Are You Losing Veterans You Worked So Hard to Recruit?
If so, you’re not alone. Many organizations spend 35% of their recruiting budgets to hire veterans, and over half of them leave their initial, post-military job within the first year. That turnover rate is unacceptable. It also doesn’t deliver on an organization’s good intentions of helping deserving veterans become productive, contributing members of a team and their communities. Veterans are accepting these positions with all good intentions about staying long-term, so what’s going wrong?
Onboarding a veteran into a civilian job is just the beginning of a long, difficult transition from a military culture to a very different and often unintelligible civilian culture. The following are three things that organizations can consider to increase the retention rate of their veteran hires:
Develop an onboarding program for veterans that includes assignment of a peer mentor, ideally another veteran who has successfully transitioned into the corporate environment. These mentors can help with learning the company culture, terminology, identifying pitfalls to look out for, etc. Perhaps most importantly, they can act as a sounding board and confidant.
Establish an Employee Resource or Inclusion Group for veterans to assist newly hired veterans with their transition from the military to the civilian workplace. In addition to providing a safe environment to ask questions and learn the “rules of the road”, this group can also provide camaraderie, which is often cited as one of the things that is most missed by veterans.
Look closely at the quality of the leadership in your organization and ask questions: How do they communicate the mission and values of the organization and the veterans’ role in supporting it? How are they developing each employee and providing support for each to be successful?
Many large and small corporations actively seek veterans to join their ranks. But these successes ring hollow if the veterans are not properly trained, developed and fully integrated into the organization.